Tech, Life and Everyday Living
Motorola Droid RAZR Review The past month I’ve had the chance to fully test the Motorola Droid RAZR. This phone is big and thin, and it’s very nice looking. I do have to say that it’s a much better phone than the Bionic, so...
Droid Bionic Review
I recently had a few weeks with the Droid Bionic and some accessories. In the spirit of full disclosure after about 4 days with the first Bionic, the device went dead because of the battery, and after...
Apple's Let's talk iPhone Announcement Apple has it’s iPhone event tomorrow. It says Let’s talk iPhone, but we all expect them to announce iOS 5 and iCloud, as well as a new iPhone of some kind.
The Times to start listening and following...
Droid Charge Review The Droid Charge by Samsung, is a decent Android phone, but it's very underpowered and outdated as far as the Android software.
It has a 4.3-inch, 800x480 display, but inside it only packs a single...
The past month I’ve had the chance to fully test the Motorola Droid RAZR. This phone is big and thin, and it’s very nice looking. I do have to say that it’s a much better phone than the Bionic, so if you have a Bionic, I’m sorry.
The phone itself is a mix of aluminum, Kevlar and Gorilla Glass. However, it may seem tough, but the back of the phone is quite slick, so I was always afraid of dropping it, and it seemed like it was just a tad too big to feel comfortable in the hand.
I recently had a few weeks with the Droid Bionic and some accessories. In the spirit of full disclosure after about 4 days with the first Bionic, the device went dead because of the battery, and after a full night on the charger it wouldn’t wake up, it was totally dead. I browsed all sorts of forums and googled the issue, but no one seems to know what exactly happened. I received my second unit, and it has worked flawlessly ever since.
That being said, let’s get into the review. As usual, I’ll start with the hardware specs of the device. It packs a 1 GHz Dual core Cortex-A9, it’s got 1 GB of memory, 16 GB of storage with an included 16GB microSD card. It’s also got an 8 MP camera with LED flash and full 1080p video recording with a front facing VGA camera. It also has Verizon 4G LTE as well as wifi and the usual suspects of GPS, etc. It also does come with the latest version of Android which is Gingerbread.
One of the biggest gripes I have with this phone, even though it’s got 16GB of internal memory, roughly have of it is loaded with software you cannot delete, such as Citrix GoToMeeting, Quickoffice, VCast Music, Verizon Media Manager and Verizon Back Up Assistant, Blockbuster, MOTOPRINT, Let’s Golf 2, Zumocast and others. I can see how some people might want these, but I truly wish the carriers and manufacturers would let the consumers decide and offer them as an optional download.
Category : Entertainment, Featured, Work, Life, etc.
Apple has it’s iPhone event tomorrow. It says Let’s talk iPhone, but we all expect them to announce iOS 5 and iCloud, as well as a new iPhone of some kind.
The Times to start listening and following along are:
7:00AM Hawaii
10:00AM Pacific
11:00AM Mountain
12:00PM Central
1:00PM Eastern
6:00PM London
Here are some places you can follow along.
The Droid Charge by Samsung, is a decent Android phone, but it’s very underpowered and outdated as far as the Android software.
It has a 4.3-inch, 800×480 display, but inside it only packs a single core processor. It does seem to be somewhat responsive, but I had to kill tasks quite a bit, and it seemed to need a reboot more than any other phone I’ve used. It comes packed with GPS, WiFi and a Verizon 4G LTE radio.
If you rely on GPS and location based services, it was very slow to get my location and gather the information.
The good thing about it is the LTE service. I was very impressed by the speed, I was consistently getting 12-15 Mbps down and between 2.5-4 up.
Hardware
It comes packed with a Tegra 2 1GHz dual core processor, sports a 1280×800 touch screen, with built in WiFi, and a 4G LTE radio. It comes with Android Honeycomb 3.1, and is a fairly fast device.
This tablet was the closest in design to the iPad 2, and it felt good to hold it, it wasn’t very heavy, and it was easy to carry around for a long time.
Category : Featured, Phones, Reviews, Web/Tech, Work, Life, etc.
I recently had time to look at the HTC Trophy, Verizion’s first Windows Phone 7 device. Let’s dive in:
If you’re looking for the fastest phone, then this probably isn’t for you, but it does come with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, it sports a 3.8-inch capacitive touch screen, 802.11n Wifi, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, GPS, FM Radio. It also comes with 8 GB of fixed flash storage with 512MB ROM, and 576MB of RAM. It also has a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and is able to take video in 720p. The bad thing is no front facing camera.
The phone is small, and it was easy to hold and use, and felt natural in the hand. The battery was good, as I could get a good 24 hours of usage out of it, and with minimal usage I could get a couple days usage.
I really liked this phone, and all in all for the people who are afraid of smartphones, this is one of the best for a beginner.
Category : Featured, iPhone, Software, Web/Tech, Work, Life, etc.
Back in January, I wrote about five things I’d like to see in iOS 5, I thought I would update that, as the beta is out, and it’s been officially announced.
The first thing on my list was wireless syncing, this is now going to be a part of the iOS system. It works in the way that everytime you plug your phone into the wall to charge, it’ll sync with iTunes automatically. It’ll also backup to iCloud if you want it to use that instead of iTunes as a backup system.
Number two on my list was lockscreen improvements. There wasn’t really a good improvement to the lockscreen, as I would have liked to see my calendar and weather, but this also is a part of number four on my list better notifications.
The third thing was SMS enhancements. This didn’t get done, as I also would’ve like them to incorporate some Bite SMS features, like quick reply, but they did come out with a new messaging system called imessage, which is an iOS to iOS device messenger, that bypasses the carriers SMS fees. It’s built into the SMS app on the iphone, and when you add the person it automatically changes to imessage if that person has it activated.
On to number four, better notifications, this got reworked, and now notifications show up on the lockscreen, and you slide the icon to open the app, and there is now a notification center that slides down from the top and all your notification are in one place, it also doesn’t do the popup window by default, it shows the notification across the top of the window.
The last thing was the built in apps and the ability to delete them. Nope, still can’t do that.
So, as I’m looking back at this, my score was 3.5/5, so that’s pretty good for a guess at what Apple will do.
Category : Featured, Phones, Reviews, Web/Tech, Work, Life, etc.
I’ve been using Google Voice for a long time now, I started using the service when it was still called Grand Central. Since the Google takeover, the service has become more and more useful. Here is my case for everyone to make the switch to Google Voice.
The newest feature that they’ve added is number porting. This of course means that you can port any current number you own to Google Voice for a small $20 fee. I myself wouldn’t want to port a cell number because you will be responsible for all ETF’s and other fees, but this makes more sense for people who want to get rid of their landline service and keep their number.
The part of the service that I use the most is the SMS, it allows you to send unlimited SMS messages for free through the service. This can be done on the iPhone and Android apps, as well as from the web interface. You can also send a message to up to 5 people as well.
The other feature that sells it for me is the phone forwarding options. This allows you to add all your current phone numbers to the service, and then when someone calls your Google Voice number it will ring to all those phones. Phones can be mobile, home or work, as well as Google Talk, and you can customize the times the phones will ring, so if you aren’t going to be home between 8-5 on weekdays, you can choose to not have it ring your home number at those times. If you are going to be in a meeting or have some work to get done, you can turn on the Do Not Disturb feature and all calls will go straight to voicemail. You can also record calls if you need to, of course you need to be aware of local laws regarding call recording.
If you don’t want to make the full switch, you can sign up for the service and just use it for voicemail on your mobile phone, because when you get a voicemail, it’s transcribed for you, so you don’t always have to listen to them. The transcription is not perfect, but 90% of the time I get the gist of it without having to listen to them.
The other thing that I love about the service is the call blocking, ever since I’ve been with the service, I hardly get anymore unwanted calls, and if I do, I block them and then the next time they call, they get the standard phone company “We’re sorry this number is no longer in service” message, and you’ll never get a call from them again.
It’s best also to keep your contacts in Google contacts and I would also recommend that you keep them in groups such as Family, Friends, Work, etc. That way, you can record separate voicemail greetings for each of those groups. Since it is a voip service, you can also buy credits to make very cheap international calls.
The service is great for what it does, and they seem to be rolling out new features on a regular basis, so go to the Google Voice website and get your number now and start using it.
As always if you have any questions you can email me or leave a comment below.
